turning pages
A duo exhibition by Bart Drost & Huub Niessen.
Both artists use a kind of strategic naivete and, with a mischievous smile, present major issues in a deceptively simple manner.
Bart Drost was showing his latest work 'the paranymphs' at Singular-Art, a wall-filling installation of 9x6 writings, flanked by 2x6 drawn boy portraits and 'the guards', a sculpture from 1992 consisting of two large birds on a poplar peak, executed in black paper mache.
Bart Drost has chosen 12 photos from the work 'Drieluik met de kunstenaar op zeer jeugdige leeftijd' (1987) and has drawn portraits of the boys who appear in them. These portraits flank the series of 54 writings.
In 2022, Bart Drost carried out his project 'het innerlijk landschap' . One part of this project was 'writing'. Bart Drost wrote 70 times 20 minutes in the transformer house on Hezelstraat in the Ooijpolder. He wrote the lines of a sheet of paper 'full' and when he reached the bottom he turned the sheet upside down and continued writing on the lines. This created 54 fully written sheets of paper. Readable/illegible.
In response to the title of the show 'every bird is a poet' and as a connection between the works of fellow artist Huub Niessen and his own work, Bart Drost placed two sculptures from 1992 in the middle of the space. A more than man-high pair of cypress-like trees with a large bird at the top. 'The guards'. Deep black.
We often see these types of trees and birds in Drost's early drawings.
